Human Resources Committee on Nov. 7th, 2013

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

I would like to come back to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. I will try to ask a question that is as technical as possible. We could have a political discussion, but that's not why you are here.

A number of Montreal airline pilots are very worried. They sometimes have a hard time keeping their job with Canadian companies or being rehired by them. They are often replaced by foreign pilots, especially American, English or German ones.

I should explain that, when pilots obtains their licence, they become general pilots. Then they have to be trained specifically for each type of airplane. An Airbus pilot who wants to fly a Boeing aircraft must first undergo new training. However, that's rather costly—$20,000 or $30,000.

Over the years, it has become clear that some companies preferred not to train their Quebecker or Canadian pilots and were bringing in other pilots from abroad instead. Their excuse was that no pilots were available to fly a specific type of airplane, and that this way, they would save on training costs.

I am talking about Canadian workers who are already qualified. What kind of training is offered to those pilots to help them continue working here, instead of being replaced by foreigners?

[Alexis Conrad]

Thank you.

Without drifting too far from where we are, I would say that the issue of foreign pilots is something that has been in the news. It's always something that's out there.

I would say that we have worked very closely with various companies. Obviously I can't get into the details of specific company information, but we probably all know which companies we're talking about. We're worked very closely with the companies for them to put in a plan to reduce their reliance on foreign pilots. They've shown good results. We are using the program to work with them to get commitments so they can transition to a Canadian workforce over time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you, Mr. Conrad. That was a good, solid answer.

Now we'll move on to Mr. Butt for five minutes.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I think we were going to finish, weren't we? Wasn't that the agreement?

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Well, my list shows you as our last speaker, but if we have consent from the—

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Daniel has a couple of questions, so I'll be more than happy to pass this on to him.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Mr. Daniel.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for being here.

To answer the question of Mr. Boulerice, the temporary pilots are only for wet-leased aircraft, for specific reasons, and not for the general application of that.

But as for my question, we've recently seen some interesting stuff happening in the U.S. with the software they've had for their Obamacare system, which failed miserably once they released it, so my question is a bit more of a technical one.

What have you done to actually validate that the software is actually going to work and that it's going to work effectively? Have you been able to pilot it with people who are actually going to use it to say “yes, this is how we feel about the software”? How do you validate all of that and make sure that when you actually open the floodgates on this it's not going to collapse in a heap?

[Atiq Rahman]

Yes, we have been following that story down there.

I can speak to the Canada student loans program and how this will work. We do have a significant number of clients. Close to a million students are in our portfolio, and more than 400,000 students apply every year.

As for what is likely to happen, as I mentioned earlier, the timing has been very good for us, in that there is a third-party service provider that administers our program, and we will be going through a new request for proposals to hire a new contractor. The transition time from the current service provider to the new one will be significant. The new one may very well be the current one—we'll go through the regular bidding process. But we usually take more than a year to transition, to test every single technology that we'll be using to make sure that everything is working. We did that last time. We'll be doing it this time, too, to ensure that hopefully nothing goes wrong.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Coming back to the temporary foreign worker program that you're proposing on an electronic basis, will you be collecting data such as the performance of some of these requests so that you can see and identify.... Several people from businesses in my riding have come to see me about that. They have worked very well on the LMO process, yet you're going through each application as if they had never applied before.

Are you going to be collecting statistics about good businesses that are using the system properly, so that when they apply you have a process that works properly? Are you collecting any other qualitative data that you might use to improve the performance of the systems you have?

That's two questions in one, I think.

[Alexis Conrad]

That's at least two questions.

Under the structure for the limited amount of service we have now, an employer registers to use the system and has an account. When they apply for labour market opinions, from that point on they apply through the same account. That gets away from a situation where every time they apply it's like a company we've never heard of before.

We have considerable amounts of quantitative and qualitative information on employers who use the program, their experience with the program, and the employers on whom we've done compliance reviews, and the results of those compliance reviews. As we move further and further into the more intense compliance activities, we'll get more of that information. And of course we use that information internally to determine where to do compliance reviews and what levels of scrutiny to bring to certain parts of the application.

Obviously when we have an employer that we know and has experience with the program and a complaint compliance record, we can track all their requests. This provides a different set of challenges from a company we've never heard of before that has no experience with our program, or potentially with any other program. So our program is quite sophisticated in how we manage that information and use it for risk purposes.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

So you are able to do a quality check on the appropriate people and streamline the process for those folks? Is that the thing, or does every application become like a brand spanking new one?

[Alexis Conrad]

When someone applies for a labour market opinion now, we put everyone through the same basic test. We have a series of labour market factors that we're required to test on, and we do that.

There are differences in verifying the history and the identity of an employer we know about, compared to one we don't know, and we will apply a sterner test and dig out more information on an employer we don't know. Then we'll keep that information in the system so that the next time, we can cross-reference it and divide the resources more appropriately at that end. So there is a difference.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

That's the time. We're going to move on to the next questioner.

Monsieur Tremblay.

[Jonathan Tremblay, NDP, Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank the four witnesses for joining us to answer our questions.

Electronic administration will apply to the Canada Pension Plan and the Employment Insurance Act. Will the whole processing operation be handled electronically? For instance, will all employment insurance applications be processed electronically? Is that part of the plan?

[Atiq Rahman]

As Alexis mentioned before, a number of the department's programs, including EI, received very similar authorities in 2012. The initiative being proposed here extends the same authorities to the Canada student loans program and the temporary foreign worker program. We do not have representatives from Employment Insurance here who can answer that question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Are you finished?

[Jonathan Tremblay, NDP, Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Okay, I believe there's consensus at the table to end the questioning at this point. Seeing no opposition to that, I want to thank the witnesses for being here. In no way does the shortness of the meeting diminish the importance of your answers today. I appreciate them and thank you for coming.

We're going to suspend the meeting and go in camera, so anyone in the room who is not an MP with one assistant needs to vacate the room.

[Proceedings continue in camera]